You don't pay them, the money is held in escrow (according to their website, not sure if that can be done to money), and will be delivered to the coder when he finished his work and you approve it.
If you rent someone for a $1000 project, he starts working on it and then you get the $1000 back using a credit card chargeback, what's the other guy working for ? He might spend 100 hours working only for you to say 'sorry don't need it anymore'.
If pay-per-copy is wrong in your view, what is your alternative ? I am sure that everyone considers $10-per-month or $1-per-hour schemes of popular MMORPG's and other online games a lot worse. What's the alternative ? $200 added to the price of every CPU sold ? State or government taxes and making game development a government-funded project like public television ?
It's like people who spend all their cash on a car, then realise they have no money left to pay for gas or insurance. Except that buying a car and then stealing gas to be able to drive it is not 'cool'. Of course piracy figures are way exaggerated. A 14-year old who downloads 500 games a year wasn't going to spend $25.000 on games anyway, yet piracy figures include those numbers anyway. But people could at least buy 1-2 games a year they really like.
I disagree with this post. As the mydoom worm showed, the best defense is to not sink to their levels, this will only backfire. The bad sides of spam is that it's often anonymous and harassing. To advocate anonymous harassment and fake claims just makes you like them.
This is the big problem. Solutions from the UNIX world are implemented, and then it can never be changed again. Supporters point to RFC's from the 80s and say 'it works as specified, so there cannot be a problem'. Seriously, it's time to phase out SMTP. It has caused a lot of problems for the last 15 years, not only buffer overruns in sendmail compromising root, but the whole protocol is flawed. It has also been extended with too many extensions (like EHLO).
The internet has grown, from an environment with mature peers and trustworthy colleagues it has become an underground free-for-all hostile environment. The way SMTP accepts mail and trusts on your good faith to provide a correct From: is not feasible anymore.
Receiving mail can be done with IMAP/POP3. Sending mail should be switched over to a new protocol that authenticates the sender with username/password, just like NNTP can do. Then the From: line has to match one of the stored addresses in its database. Clients can modify their list of addresses through a secure webpage, allowing the server to connect throwaway accounts to the user. Then only listed clients can send mail through that server. Server to server relies on public key authentication. There can be a 2-year transition period for everyone to update their software, after that SMTP should be gone.
The solution would be if shopkeepers had a fixed amount of money and would run out. This is not possible because they would run out of money soon and all trading would stall. So you must have merchants that have infinite money and will gladly buy 20 leather armors that were left by respawning low level characters, even if he has 9900 of those in his inventory already.
Games like this need respawning monsters. If they leave loot, items with value keep entering the economy. So the gold supply keeps on growing.
True... The Apple founders were Beatle fans, so they called their company Apple. When they gained success they signed an agreement with the Apple managers/lawyers (the Beatles record lable 1966-1970) that they could use the Apple name just as long as they never entered the music business. Of course it didn't take long before they got sued over midi software. And now again over iTunes, will they ever learn ?
It's a pain to get memory for a 386. 30-pin simms have to be installed by fours and only go up to 4 MB.
Why not start with a 486/33, those can be had for free too.
Good news... Enterprise was the weakest of them all. The vulcan girl is a shallow ripoff of Seven of Nine, and the episodes are not that enjoyable. It's a bit embarassing for true trekkies to see a captain who's not very smart and seems to be ruled by emotion and prejudice. Instead of good stories it's just a shallow action show with lots of shooting and fighting now.
It's the best thing to stop it now before it sinks to new lows.
It's been happening for the last 10 years or so, but the words 'beta test' lost all meaning, judging from the replies here as well. There used to be a decent distinction between alpha test and beta test. Alpha means it isn't yet 100% complete, beta means it's basically finished and only needs to be tested before final release, with the possibility of bug tests.
A beta test copy of software used to mean that it was the release candidate. Originally a beta test didn't mean the owner knows that it's full of bugs, or that parts still have to be completed. I am surprized to see some companies do betas while they are still developing it, or have to still add the magic and only combat works.
Of course users will see a beta test as a chance to play a game for free, and to play it as soon as possible. They know that out of 100 users only 5 will report bugs or even read the forum.
I was at a toy store today to check out the games.
I was surprised to find many top titles of only 6-12 months ago sitting there discounted to almost nothing. For $10 you could pick up No One Lives Forever 2, a great game. Unreal 2, Splinter Cell are already down to $30, just a few months and they'll be $20 or $15.
A game like Grand Theft Auto 3 was $15 while GTA3-Vice City was $40. Vice City is just the same engine, just with different maps and missions. Games from 2002-2003 are still great to play. Even 2001 games would still look good on common PC's. If you insist on spending $50 on the latest titles, there seems to be more choice than ever.
A bunch of utilities that do things a dozen other things do already get prizes. So what.
Meanwhile I, like many others, sit here waiting looking at sites and sourceforge pages for projects that have reached version 0.90 or 0.99 and haven't had any updates since july.
It's simple, journalists must broadcast verifyable facts and speak the truth. Or else they are columnists and should identify themselves as such.
I'd recommend everyone to watch the movie Shattered Glass, it's a good thriller about a reporter who gets caught on a minor error and then sees his house of cards he built by going further and further by inserting false facts and bogus stories into the magazine he wrote for, untill his fall. He was eventually fired on the spot. It's based on a true story.
Did you know that the actor Michael Keaton's real name is Michael Douglas ? (but he's not related to the Michael Douglas we know) When he started in movies he changed his screen name himself because he realised that two actors with the same name would never work.
That's a sad fact of life. If your name is Harrison Ford, but you're not the actor, you cannot really get www.harrisonford.com even if it's available. The general public associates that name with the actor, so even if it's registered to you he can claim it afterwards anyway.
It's like getting passed a counterfeit $20 bill and getting caught for trying to spend it.
In that case you never get your $20 back, because what you were trying to spend wasn't $20 in the first place. A domain name taken away because it's a trademarked name wasn't a valid domain name anyway and you have no rights to it.
First-come first-serve only applies for neutral names.
maxpublic, you are seriously mistaken.
Of course geeks want to believe it's a first-come first-serve base, but although it started that way, legislation has stepped in and overruled that.
The law, specifically regarding brand names, trademarks, etc. recognises that names and brands are valuable, and protects them from abuse.
Names of famous people are trademarks, and they don't even have to be registered to be recognised as such. A domain name is nothing, just an entry in a long list, and the owner of the list can just hand over domains to others if he pleases.
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You don't pay them, the money is held in escrow (according to their website, not sure if that can be done to money), and will be delivered to the coder when he finished his work and you approve it. If you rent someone for a $1000 project, he starts working on it and then you get the $1000 back using a credit card chargeback, what's the other guy working for ? He might spend 100 hours working only for you to say 'sorry don't need it anymore'.
If pay-per-copy is wrong in your view, what is your alternative ? I am sure that everyone considers $10-per-month or $1-per-hour schemes of popular MMORPG's and other online games a lot worse.
What's the alternative ? $200 added to the price of every CPU sold ? State or government taxes and making game development a government-funded project like public television ?
It's like people who spend all their cash on a car, then realise they have no money left to pay for gas or insurance. Except that buying a car and then stealing gas to be able to drive it is not 'cool'.
Of course piracy figures are way exaggerated. A 14-year old who downloads 500 games a year wasn't going to spend $25.000 on games anyway, yet piracy figures include those numbers anyway. But people could at least buy 1-2 games a year they really like.
All the things you mention are just a question of the user interface, especially scratching etc. How about Final scratch ?
I disagree with this post. As the mydoom worm showed, the best defense is to not sink to their levels, this will only backfire.
The bad sides of spam is that it's often anonymous and harassing. To advocate anonymous harassment and fake claims just makes you like them.
Blow Out is just a remake of Blow Up, where a photographer accidentally photographs a murder. I believe it starred Donald Sutherland.
This is the big problem.
Solutions from the UNIX world are implemented, and then it can never be changed again. Supporters point to RFC's from the 80s and say 'it works as specified, so there cannot be a problem'.
Seriously, it's time to phase out SMTP. It has caused a lot of problems for the last 15 years, not only buffer overruns in sendmail compromising root, but the whole protocol is flawed. It has also been extended with too many extensions (like EHLO).
The internet has grown, from an environment with mature peers and trustworthy colleagues it has become an underground free-for-all hostile environment. The way SMTP accepts mail and trusts on your good faith to provide a correct From: is not feasible anymore.
Receiving mail can be done with IMAP/POP3. Sending mail should be switched over to a new protocol that authenticates the sender with username/password, just like NNTP can do. Then the From: line has to match one of the stored addresses in its database. Clients can modify their list of addresses through a secure webpage, allowing the server to connect throwaway accounts to the user.
Then only listed clients can send mail through that server. Server to server relies on public key authentication.
There can be a 2-year transition period for everyone to update their software, after that SMTP should be gone.
The solution would be if shopkeepers had a fixed amount of money and would run out. This is not possible because they would run out of money soon and all trading would stall. So you must have merchants that have infinite money and will gladly buy 20 leather armors that were left by respawning low level characters, even if he has 9900 of those in his inventory already. Games like this need respawning monsters. If they leave loot, items with value keep entering the economy. So the gold supply keeps on growing.
True... The Apple founders were Beatle fans, so they called their company Apple. When they gained success they signed an agreement with the Apple managers/lawyers (the Beatles record lable 1966-1970) that they could use the Apple name just as long as they never entered the music business.
Of course it didn't take long before they got sued over midi software. And now again over iTunes, will they ever learn ?
How about the NeXT Cube ? At least that was black.
It's a pain to get memory for a 386. 30-pin simms have to be installed by fours and only go up to 4 MB. Why not start with a 486/33, those can be had for free too.
Good news... Enterprise was the weakest of them all. The vulcan girl is a shallow ripoff of Seven of Nine, and the episodes are not that enjoyable. It's a bit embarassing for true trekkies to see a captain who's not very smart and seems to be ruled by emotion and prejudice. Instead of good stories it's just a shallow action show with lots of shooting and fighting now. It's the best thing to stop it now before it sinks to new lows.
It's been happening for the last 10 years or so, but the words 'beta test' lost all meaning, judging from the replies here as well. There used to be a decent distinction between alpha test and beta test. Alpha means it isn't yet 100% complete, beta means it's basically finished and only needs to be tested before final release, with the possibility of bug tests. A beta test copy of software used to mean that it was the release candidate. Originally a beta test didn't mean the owner knows that it's full of bugs, or that parts still have to be completed. I am surprized to see some companies do betas while they are still developing it, or have to still add the magic and only combat works. Of course users will see a beta test as a chance to play a game for free, and to play it as soon as possible. They know that out of 100 users only 5 will report bugs or even read the forum.
I was at a toy store today to check out the games.
I was surprised to find many top titles of only 6-12 months ago sitting there discounted to almost nothing. For $10 you could pick up No One Lives Forever 2, a great game. Unreal 2, Splinter Cell are already down to $30, just a few months and they'll be $20 or $15.
A game like Grand Theft Auto 3 was $15 while GTA3-Vice City was $40. Vice City is just the same engine, just with different maps and missions. Games from 2002-2003 are still great to play. Even 2001 games would still look good on common PC's. If you insist on spending $50 on the latest titles, there seems to be more choice than ever.
A bunch of utilities that do things a dozen other things do already get prizes. So what.
Meanwhile I, like many others, sit here waiting looking at sites and sourceforge pages for projects that have reached version 0.90 or 0.99 and haven't had any updates since july.
It's simple, journalists must broadcast verifyable facts and speak the truth. Or else they are columnists and should identify themselves as such.
I'd recommend everyone to watch the movie Shattered Glass, it's a good thriller about a reporter who gets caught on a minor error and then sees his house of cards he built by going further and further by inserting false facts and bogus stories into the magazine he wrote for, untill his fall. He was eventually fired on the spot. It's based on a true story.
Did you know that the actor Michael Keaton's real name is Michael Douglas ? (but he's not related to the Michael Douglas we know) When he started in movies he changed his screen name himself because he realised that two actors with the same name would never work.
That's a sad fact of life. If your name is Harrison Ford, but you're not the actor, you cannot really get www.harrisonford.com even if it's available. The general public associates that name with the actor, so even if it's registered to you he can claim it afterwards anyway.
It's like getting passed a counterfeit $20 bill and getting caught for trying to spend it. In that case you never get your $20 back, because what you were trying to spend wasn't $20 in the first place. A domain name taken away because it's a trademarked name wasn't a valid domain name anyway and you have no rights to it.
First-come first-serve only applies for neutral names.
maxpublic, you are seriously mistaken. Of course geeks want to believe it's a first-come first-serve base, but although it started that way, legislation has stepped in and overruled that. The law, specifically regarding brand names, trademarks, etc. recognises that names and brands are valuable, and protects them from abuse. Names of famous people are trademarks, and they don't even have to be registered to be recognised as such. A domain name is nothing, just an entry in a long list, and the owner of the list can just hand over domains to others if he pleases.